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63 Anthony Butts Cyclones The apocalypse did not come as was foretold because my brother only claimed to be Jesus, laying his hands firmly on my head in the same unsteady motion that I was to later see in nature. I was a marigold and he was a bee hovering indecisively over me, shifting from left to right, in his triangulation of desire, in the living science of math, as hot and cold as the air of spring. God is the pea-green dome above the rain, his voice a fluctuating command for me to be first hot then cold then hot again in a perfect dance to copy the quick and fickle repetition that forced me to remain awake. But I believed my petals were as much a part of that storm as my brother himself, my body reorganized around his desire, hot and cold winds cycling until I became a rapid swirl of both and older than the land that I was standing on. My body was no longer mine, eyes deeper than world without end, a bottomless shaft of wind churning around a center without form, bits and pieces of landscape torn, reconstituted as I roamed, like him, with godlike will. His boredom equaled anger, the equation that inspires excitement, my body shedding a mass of heavy water lobbed like lodestones through the air, every splinter a javelin, every fleck in my eyes a section of wooden windmills, turning like swords of Eden. 64 the minnesota review Spellbound My body is the landscape of conversations, with people wandering through the new earth beneath this sycamore, my skin shedding a spiral of double meanings, in the husks of my words descending like dry seed through the air. There was a time when I thought that my body was only the landscape of the earth until a lover took me to the center of a lake to make me swim for the first time, and I realized that I had seen the shore from there before, when I needed to float and not to sink. I was innocent, my arms and legs flailing against the first waves that restrained me, my words seeming like stones lobbed back to shore in a siege of misunderstanding, in the metaphor that would signal my rebirth like a comet passing. I was reborn through guilt to live in the image my brother had of me, a conjurer, a living shadow that cast its spell upon him like the moon does during an eclipse of the sun, the world drowned in the light of night and day. All the animals of the earth listened to me, disturbed by a sudden sense of night, responding to the charmed voices of my human companions calling like cardinals to each other as if I were God listening, as if my voice were not responsible for leading them. Because of him I learned not only to map the landscape of conversations but to quicken them, my every word birthing twin connotations until I was surrounded by a family of gypsies who would never reveal the road the led back to the lake where I was safely floating. ...

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